Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.
After fixing bad algorithms, dealing with performance and resource utilization basically comes down to a series of trade-offs. In most cases:
Less RAM = More CPU or more disk space (and much slower)
Less CPU = more disk or RAM
Less disk = more network, RAM and/or CPU
Re:We Need Chrome No More
by darkarmani on Thursday February 28, 2019 @05:36PM
(#19276024)
> a bad algorithm somewhere
Along the lines of a custom memory manager, that never releases memory back to the OS. If you open tons of tabs, closing them wouldn't release the memory back. Which is a decent guess - it used the memory once, it will probably need it again.
Yeah, i agree. And very succinctly put too.
I think another factor is just that Chrome's speed changed the landscape of web design itself, which fed back into Chrome's popularity.
By making javascript so much faster, it allowed web designers to do things that only Chrome could do.
Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.